On the map Kosovo is a small rather neat rhombus wedged in between Montenegro to the west, Albania to the south west, Macedonia to the south east and the ever enveloping Serbia to the north and east. In shape and size and population, but not in history, it curiously resembles another rhomboid-like state, Montenegro, and in shape, size, population and history it vaguely resembles another troubled province, Northern Ireland. Unlike Northern Ireland its boundaries are sharply defined. Between it and Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro high mountain ranges, rising to well over two thousand metres, debar entry or exit. In April 1988, trying to reach Montenegro from Macedonia, I made a long detour through snow-covered passes to get to Prizren to the south of Kosovo and travelled through a flat valley to Pec, only to be told that there was no way west or north through the snow, and that I would have to travel back to Kosovo Polje in the east of the province and then into Serbia in order to get into Montenegro.
Between Kosovo and southern Serbia the mountains, though high, are less impregnable, and our car got through without any difficulty, as it did through what seemed a fairly low range of hills in the centre of the province. This area in the centre is known as Drenica after the river that runs through it. The Drenica is a tributary of the Sitnica which is a tributary of the Ibar which is a tributary of the Morava which is a tributary of the Danube which runs into the Black Sea. Also in Drenica are the head waters of the Bistrica which runs into the White Drin which runs into the Black Drin to emerge into the Adriatic, and the head waters of the Sazlija which becomes the Neromidka which becomes the Vardar which, known as the Axios, flows into the Aegean.
Rivers run innocently, men less so. Kosovo is a central square in the chequerboard of Balkan geography, and as in chess where the four central squares are hotly disputed, so in history Kosovo has been the scene of numerous battles. The most famous of these battles was fought between the Serbs and Turks on 28 June 1389. Sultan Murad of the Turks was assassinated just before the battle, Prince Lazar of the Serbs was executed just after it. These facts are at any rate certain in a story etched into Serbian memory by a series of epic lays in which history tends to be replaced by legend. The result of the battle is in doubt. It seems like a double checkmate. In the West bells were initially rung for what seemed a heroic victory. Serbian sons see the battle as a heroic defeat. Turkish sources are paradoxically ambiguous. We see battles too easily in chess terms of winning and losing, black and white. Probably at Kosovo there were men of a variety of races on both sides and, both before and after the battle Kosovo and Southern Serbia, they were ruled by leaders who owed some kind of allegiance to the Turks.
In 1448 two of the last remaining defenders of the Balkans, the Hungarian Hunyadi and the Albanian Scanderbeg agreed to meet on the plains of Kosovo, but Sultan Murad's great-grandson, also called Murad, checkmated them by arriving early and routing Hunyadi before Scanderbeg had time to arrive. We hear less of this battle in Serbian lays, although the two battles were probably confused. After the first battle Lazar's son Stephen kept control of Kosovo, which together with northern Serbia he handed over intact to his successor, George Brancovic. This ruler, who finally lost Kosovo to the Turks, played rather a dubious part in the second battle, a part which may have unfairly blackened the reputation of his grandfather Vuk Brancovic in legends about the first.
After some hundred years of semi-independence Kosovo finally became Turkish and remained so for over four hundred and fifty years. There is still a sizeable Turkish minority in the province. In the seventeenth century the Austro-Hungarian Empire began expanding into the noew enfeebled Ottoman Empire. There was another battle which the Hapsburgs won in 1688. Austria was anxious to keep Kosovo as a white square between the two black squares of Monetengro and Serbia, and even for a short time took control of the Sandjak of Novi Pazar just north of Kosovo, but Turkey's defeat in the Balkan war of 1912 meant the division of Kosovo and the Sandjak between the two orthodox Slav states, united in Yugoslavia after the First World War. When the Serbian armies retook Kosovo after a fourth battle they kissed the ground in homage to their past.
Unfortunately, by the time of this reconquest, Kosovo was largely inhabited by Albanians. This fact ws recognised during the Second World War when the Axis carved up Yugoslavia and gave most of Kosovo and some of Macedonia to a puppet Albania. It was recognised in a half-hearted way under Tito, when Kosovo was briefly given autonomous status, as was Voivoidina, within the Republic of Serbia. This status was too little for Albanian nationalists who demanded and are demanding a full republic akin to Montenegro, and too much for full-blooded Serbs, who in the present wave of hardline chauvinism have rescinded Kosovo's autonomy. At the moment the growing Albanian birthrate means that the Serbs are outnumbered in Kosovo by nearly 6 to 1, and the growing nationalist mood of Serbia means that the majority are ruled as a subject people by this thin minority.
It is possible, though unfashionable, to have some sympathy for Serb claims to Kosovo. Literature in the shape of the epic lays, and religion in the shape of the magnificent churches of Decani, Gracanica and Pec show a strong Serbian presence in the area during the fourteenth century. The Kosovo lays became famous because of the work of Milman Parry who showed that they shared stylistic features in common with the Iliad and the Odyssey, features which result from the poems being originally sung by illiterate bards. More recent Homeric scholarship has suggested that there is a pattern and purpose behind the Iliad and the Odyssey, well beyond the capability of illiterate bards, but in fact it is possible to trace in the Kosovo legends a kind of philosophical thread. Prince Lazar is offered the choice of a heavenly kingdom or an earthly kingdom. He chooses the heavenly kingdom, loses the battle, but leaves his fellow Serbs an eternal legacy enshrined in the great churches and monasteries of the area.
History works on a rather less lofty level. It is extremely difficult to use Homer or the Kosovo lays as historical evidence, but there is not a great deal of other evidence for the history of Kosovo. In pre-Roman times it was inhabited by the Dardanians, like the Illyrians further west a thorn in the side of the Macedonian kingdom, but probably of a different race from either Illyrians or Macedonians. The Romans after fighting their way to the Danube frontier made strenuous and largely unexcavated efforts through roads and towns to link the Danube to the Adriatic coast. Pristina is on the site of ancient Theranda, Lipljan preserves the name of ancient Ulpiana.
When Diocletian split his empire Kosovo and Bosnia both fell somewhere between East and West, now passing to one half, now to another. This ambiguity, later reflected in a divided religious loyalty, was to have terrible consequences for both provinces. When the Western Empire fell, most of modern Yugoslavia, including Kosovo, remained in the still vigorous Eastern Empire, although as previously pointed out there were still Latin-speakers in this eastern section. It oculd be maintained that the oldest and therefore the best qualified inhabitants of Kosovo are the Latin-speaking Vlachs, undoubtedly present in medieval and even modern times. In the sixth century the Slav invasions began, and we have almost no accounts of the history of Kosovo. In the eastern Balkans the Bulgarians created a strong kingdom thta challenged Byzantium. The Serbs in the west were less united and less independent. Kosovo would have been under Bulgarian control for some of this dark age until at the beginning of the eleventh century Basil the Bulgarslayer again recovered all the land south of the Danube. Kosovo and Serbia owuld then have remained under nominal Byzantine control for two hundred years.
With the Fourth Crusade and the rise of the Second Bulgarian or Vlach Empire Kosovo passed for ever from Byzantine rule. Initially Bulgarian, it soon fell under the sway of the powerful Serb Nemanjid dynasty. Under this dynasty, bloodthirsty but pious, Serbia at lats came into its own. Its founder, Stephen Nemanja, had his capital as Ras, near Novi Pazar, but united the zupanate of Raska to that of Zeta, which was roughly equivalent to modern Montenegro. His elder son obtained the title of king from the Pope, while his younger son Sava became archbishop of a Serbian orthodox church with its centre at Pec in Kosovo. Successive kings drove the frontier southwards. The capital was briefly aat Pristina, the modern capital of Kosovo, but Stephen Uros II (1282-1321) moved it to Skopje. Under Stephen Dusan (1321-1355) the Serbian Empire reached its zenith with Kosovo and Macedonia at its centre. Like the Byzantine Empire, whose art and culture it aped, Dusan's empire was a multi-racial one. The royal family by frequent dynastic marriages were linked to other rulers of the Blakans.
Dusan's aim was to found a new dynasty at Constantinople, but he died one year after the first establishment of the Turks in Europe, and with startling rapidity his empire fell to pieces, the Turks being the chief gainers. His son, Stephen Uros V, lived until 1371, the year in which the Turks defeated a united Slav army at the battle of the Maritsa, but long before his death the Serbian Empire existed only in name with its territory disputed by feuding warlords. Many of these warlords became vassals of the Turks, notably Marko Kraljevic of Prilep and Tsar Lazar of Kosovo fame. Lazar ony revolted when the Sultan demanded that he take part in a Turkish campaign, and Lazar's son did actually take part in such a campaign, fighting heroically with a Serbian contingent against Tamburlaine in the battle of Ankara of 1402.
Such historic facts tend to be forgotten in glorious legends, magnified by nationalist pride. However, history does show a strong Serbian presence in Kosovo and even in Macedonia, under the Nemanjids. Marko Kraljevic did live in Prilep, Macedonia. It is true that he is also a hero of Bulgarian songs, and that some of his exploits remind us of the Byzantine epic of Digenis akrites. William of Tyre in the thirteenth century spoke ill of Serbs in Bitola, and Byzantine chroniclers mention Serbs in Greece.
When the Turks took control of Kosovo after the second battle in 1448, we have the first proper records of who was living in the disputed territory. Unfortunately Albanian and Serbian historians dispute the findings of these records. The Turks did not distinguish their subjects into separate races, and the names given can be interpreted in different ways. In fact ethnic identity was never a very important factor in medieval times. The Byzantine Empire was a multi-ethnic state, a fact that Dusan recognised when in his challenge for the throne of Constantinople he called himself Emperor and Autocrat of the Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians and Albanians. Even the patriotic lays of Kosovo find it hard to disguise the fact tht on the fatal day there were both Serbs and Albanians fighting on both sides, although this fact is not part of official Serbian or Albanian history.
National feeling was not and probably is not as important as religious feeling. Even the Turks distinguished those of the true faith from infidels. Conversions to Islam were frequent in areas such as Bosnia and Albania where loyalties were divided between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. There were economic motives for such conversions, and the rpesence in the area of the Bogomil heresy was another factor. Thanks to the patriarchate of Pec Orthodoxy was strong in Kosovo, but in 1691 the Patriarch Arsenje III organised a great emigration from Kosovo to settle in southern Hungary. Whatever the ethnic composition of Kosovo before this date, it is clear that after it Albanian Muslims were in the majority.
By 1691 the Ottoman Empire was clearly in decline. Austrian armies were generally victorious, but had by the treaty of Karlovitz in 1699 only been awarded northern Croatia. In the eighteenth century economic factors led to large-scale emigration from the Balkans into central Europe. Tensions between Catholicism and Orthodoxy made the Serbs less eager to rise against the Turks. The Serbian religious position was weakened by the decision to abolish the patriarchate of Pec in 1766 and to put the Serbian church under the control of the Greeks.
Early nineteenth-century nationalism revolted against this decision. The Serbs found a new defender in the Russians, both Slav and Orthodox. The great Serbian scholar Vuk Karazdic amazingly succeeded in welding together a number of disparate dialects into a common literary tongue. It was perhaps unfortunate that this literary language was based on the language of the Kosovo lays, and that both the religious and literary heart of modern Serbia was thus to be found in a province to which otherwise they had little linguistic claim. Greece had similar religious problems with Constantinople, but could at any raate look to an alternative linguistic and literary heritage based on Athens.
It took almost a hundred years bfore Serbia, which had gained some kind of autonomy for the area and around Belgrade in 1815, reached the sacred soil of Kosovo in 1912. The Serbs were helped by the Russians, hindered by the Austrians. They were helped by some sympathy in England and France for emergent small nations, hindered by the behaviour of rival royal dynasties, as violent and treacherous as the Namanjids, but not as powerful. Nevertheless gallant little Serbia won and still wins some support from contemporary politicians and modern historians, even though it was Serbia with her Austrian enemies and Russian friends who brought about the First World War. In this war the Serbs after a brave initial resistance were easily crushed by superior manpower and had to fight their way through Kosovo and Albania to a safe refuge in Corfu. This fighting march in which the Serbs abandoned their heavy artillery but preserved their religious relics did not improve Serb-Albanian relations.
Transferred from Corfu to Salonica the Serbian army took part in the final Allied advance, and was rewarded for being on the right side by being transformed into greater Yugoslavia, gaining territory in the process from Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and even in the Kosovo area from Albania. The inter-war years were not happy ones with Croatian and Macedonian nationalism resentful of Serbian rule. King Alexander, a Serb, eventually assassinated in 1934 by a combination of revolutionary movements, strove in vain for Yugoslav unity, even dividing the country in 1929 into banovine which cut across ethnic divisions. Thus Kosovo, though mainly in Zetska, which also included Montenegro, was also in Vardarska, a larger Macedonia, and Moravska or Eastern Serbia.
In 1941 the Axis after a lightning invasion set about dismembering Yugoslavia. Kosovo became part of an Italian-dominated Albania. there was a Scanderbeg division formed to fight against Yugoslav resistance, which after the Italian collapse in 1943 soon proved superior. Tito's stand against the German and Italian occupatioin proved popular with all sections of the commuity. He made some concessions to nationalist feeling by making Macedonia a separate republic and giving Kosovo limited autonomy. The break with Stalin in 1948 meant a break with Albania, with whom Yugoslavia had been previously on very good terms, so much so that it almost looked as if Albania might become an additional Yugoslav republic.
Economic difficulties in 1968 led to riots in Kosovo. More favourable treatment accorded to the region led to resentment against it. This resentment had unfortunate consequences. Prosperous and hard-working Slovenes objected to the amount of money in the federal budget given to what they saw as the feckless population of the southern part of the country. Eventually they carried their objections to the point of secession. This secession was painless, that of Croatia less so. The beleaguered Communist regime in Serbia, faced with external isolation and internal resentment, rode hard, and for a time successfully, on a wave of pro-Serb chauvinism. Kosovo is now ruled by the Serbs in much the same way as the South African government used to rule that country before the release of Nelson Mandela. The comparison is not an exact one. The Albanians do have voting rights, but choose not to use them. They used to be able to go and enjoy education at the University of Pristina, but classes are now held only in Serbian, and the Albanians boycott the university. Hyperinflation and a low budget cause most misery among the poor, and the Albanians have always been poor. Kosovo now bears all the hallmarks of a police state.
Of course, right is not all on one side. Truth is very rarely pure and never simple. It is natural that the Serbs in Kosovo dislike the Albanians. Events in both world wars hardly encouraged friendship. There is a long record of hostility between Christianity and Islam in the Balkans, and the Albanians and Turks in Kosovo are Muslims. In Kosovo the Serbs can with some justification point to the barbaric institution of the blood feud, still strong here, having been less successfully stamped out than in Hoxha's Albania. The ready sympathy of progressive liberals in the West is naturally enlisted on behalf of the oppressed Albanian population of Kosovo. Such sympathy might not be so easily accorded if it was known that some families are so keen on male heirs that they pass off their girls as boys, thus condemning some unfortunate females to a life of masculine toil and enforced virginity.
Above all the Serbs are in the unfortunate position of being a majority threatened with being turned into a minority. There is an analogy with Northern Ireland here, but not an exact one. Protestants outnumber Catholics in Ulster by roughly 2 to 1 under the present regime, but would be outnumbered by the same proportion if Northern Ireland became part of a United Ireland. Serbs outnumber Albanians by 5 to 1 in the whole of Serbia, including Kosovo and the Voivodina, but would be outnumbered by almost 6 to 1 if Kosovo became independent. If Kosovo were to join Albania the Serbs would of course be in a tiny minority, but here the parallel breaks down as both geography and economics make the idea of a United Albania a fairly unlikely one. The Albanian government has enough problems of its own without adding the running of a broken province to them. This province is detached from them by a high mountain barrier and forty-five years of isolation as a result of Hoxha's break with Tito. Albanians have mixed feelings for the Kosovars, even by a fine irony making jokes about them in the same way as the British make jokes about the Irish.
The Serbs like the Ulster Protestants have their national myth, Prince Lazar being a more romantic if less successful totem pole than William of Orange. The Kosovo Albanians have less history to sustain them. Scanderbeg, the only figure in Albanian history before the nineteenth century, did not play much part in the history of Kosovo apart from missing his appointment with Hunyadi. The first stirrings of Albanian independence came late in the nineteenth century and lacked unity of focus. The Albanians had three religions and their language lacked a common alphabet. Early advocates of Albanian independence often lived abroad, sometimes as officials of the Ottoman Empire. Many of the revolutionary movements of the Albanians were directed against independence from the Turks rather than for it, since Albanians led by their powerful beys preferred the Ottoman rule or the lack of it to being divided between Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece, all non-Islamic states.
It was, it is true, at Prizren in Kosovo that the first stirrings of Albanian independence were heard in 1878. Patriots gathered from inside and outside Albania to establish a league, quickly suppressed by the Turkish authorities. In this league there were more representatives from the Ghegs in the north than the Tosks in the south, and more enthusiasm for independence from Albanian regions outside modern Albania than those inside it. Albania's birth in the Balkans virtually coincided with the liberation of Kosovo from the Turks, and both events were overtaken by the First World War in which both areas were occupied by foreign powers. In between the wars there were rapid changes of regime in Albania and complicated boundary negotiations between Yugoslavia and Albania. Any movement for the independence of Kosovo or its union with Albania stood little chance of wide recognition, especially as Yugoslavia was faced by so many other schismatic movements. In the Second World War one of the parties opposing the Communist Partisans was the Balli Kombetar, hostile to the Italians, hostile to King Zog, but in favour of independence for Kosovo. Hoxha however until 1948 was strongly under Yugoslav influence and then broke abruptly with Tito. Not surprisingly Kosovo did not feature very highly on either country's agenda.
Kosovo now stands high on the agenda of Balkan pundits, predicting doom and gloom in the near future. In Bosnia Serbs pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing, but is hardly possible to do this in Kosovo without creating a desert. Against the run of propaganda Serbs claim that Muslims are killing Serbs in Bosnia and no doubt fear for their fellow countrymen in Kosovo, although very few Serbs have been killed. Albania is unlikely to take on the superior Serb army without provocation, but is unlikely to stand by idly if there is insurrection in Kosovo. Miraculously the Albanian majority have so far avoided violence in their resistance.
An independent Kosovo with a population of one and a half million is not a total impossibility. Slovenia and Macedonia are not much larger, Montenegro much smaller. But Kosovo is economically poor, and the infrastructure is at the moment controlled by the Serbs. The two valleys of Kosovo and Metohia have potentially valuable agricultural land, but the rapidly growing population means that it can hardly be self-sufficient. Recent events have deprived many young Kosovars from earning a living as gastarbeiter in Germany. The great Serbian monuments hardly bring in any touristst now, and it is difficult to see them doing so in the future.
One possible way forward would be for Kosovo to unite with another Balkan state. Montenegro has traditionally been the foe of the Albanians and the friend of the Serbs. Bosnia or what is left of it is not geographically continguous to Kosovo, and apart from Islam the inhabitants of Sarajevo have little in common with the Kosovars. Macedonia seems the best bet. If the two states united there would be a total population of three and a half million inhabitants, of whom one and a half would be Albanians and one and a half million would be Slavs of one kind or another. Such a state would be economically viable with better communications than either state on its own. It would share on the one hand a common Nemanjid and Orthodox history, on the other a long rule by Islam.
It is true that nation states with two different races have not been a great success. Belgium, Cyprus, Lebanon and Sri Lanka are hardly comforting examples. It is true that the Serbs, even buttressed by their fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Macedonians, would be reluctant to give up their hegemony in Kosovo. But we cannot go on fragmenting the Balkans for ever. Both Kosovo and Macedonia are full of tiny fragments, some of which have been discussed or mentioned, like the Vlachs on Mount Pelister, the Pomaks near Prilep, the Turks near Prizren. One can go on multiplying examples; there are gypsy communities which claim Egyptian nationality, tin workers in Pristina who have strange argots of their own, but we don't hear much about these fragments as they do realise that they must subordinate something of the past, and forget something of the past, to save the whole. Most of what was Yugoslavia does not seem to have learned this lesson.